Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., right, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, attend a news conference following a Senate policy luncheon on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017, in Washington. Republicans muscled the most sweeping rewrite of the nation’s tax laws in more than three decades through the House with an expected vote in the Senate to follow.

In the wake of President Trump’s first official State of the Union speech, and the positive momentum in the economy, the putative “party of the people” now faces a much under addressed internal crisis. United against Trump, the factions which dominate the party increasingly operate at cross purposes.

Ultimately all parties are coalitions of disparate groups and interests. Much attention has been on the divisions within the ruling GOP — libertarians, social conservatives and populist/nationalists. But with the Democrats poised to make a comeback this year, and perhaps gain control of all three branches by 2020, perhaps it’s time to analyze divisions that may determine the extent of their ascendancy.

Three different, and often somewhat hostile, tendencies now define the Democratic Party. These include the corporate oligarchs, causists obsessed with particular hot button issues and arguably the most critical to long-term ascendency, populists, who bear much of the party’s social democratic message and legacy.

The oligarchs

Republicans still retain the allegiance of certain, older industries — pharmaceuticals, energy, home-building, agriculture and manufacturing — but the post-industrial information age moguls are almost entirely Democrats. This trend has been building since the time of Bill Clinton, and remains even more evident in the Trump era.

Much of this has to do with geography and culture. Tech, media and entertainment firms are almost entirely concentrated on either the west or east coast, where being a Republican identifies you as “uncool,” or if you dissent too openly, potentially unemployed. Heavily dependent on imported labor, these firms particularly seek to expand their already large numbers of HIB indentured servants, something Trump, and for his part Bernie Sanders, have opposed.

Causists — gay rights, feminists, extreme greens, retro-urbanists and race-based political movements — now constitute the ascendant wing of the Democratic Party today. Their passion, communication and organizational skill increasingly drives the party agenda, turning traditional liberals increasingly into radicals with often extreme views “mainstreamed” into basic party dogma.

To be sure, the issues of the causists started, and remain, critical concerns that need to be addressed. But the current political physics tends to push each of these movements towards ever greater stridency and extremism, threatening the party’s long-term ability to win over middle of the road, suburban voters.

Greens, for example, not satisfied with improving air or water, or even reducing greenhouse gases, increasingly threaten the very bases of middle-class aspiration, such as home ownership, and have turned increasingly against capitalism itself. Similarly gender advocates often err between a rightful advocacy of rights and protections for women and gays to insisting that whites and males, in particular, repent their biological essence.

Similarly social justice warriors can no longer be satisfied with incremental change or the idea of using economic growth to address issues of inequality and class mobility. In their brave new world non-citizens are treated no differently than those who went through the process, and may even get the vote, at least in California. They also increasingly demand single-payer healthcare and free college which will require much higher taxes. At some point in their drive for something akin to Scandinavian socialism, they may run directly into the interests of the oligarchs, who despised by the left, still fund the party and many causists.

The populists

In deep blue “fortress cities” with large populations of educated global citizens, the causists views are widely accepted without question. But in much of the country — most importantly the Midwest — neither the oligarchs nor the zealots have much hold outside big city cores and college towns.

True Middle American populists — Bernie Sanders after all represents post-industrial retirement colony of Vermont — are increasingly marginalized in a party dominated by identity issue activists and the big money of the post-industrial hierarchy. The other factions’ agenda — free trade globalism, uncontrolled immigration, strident social liberalism and identity politics — are the very things that could help re-elect Trump.

To win and consolidate their gains, particularly amidst a now strong economy, Democrats need to find a way to recover their basic economic message — as they did under President Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They should focus on how to build sustained economic growth that would provide better opportunities for upward mobility for middle and working class voters, and in particular millennials. If they choose however to listen primarily to causists and oligarchs, they may win in the short run, given the ineptitude of their opponents, but may prove unable to sustain their ascendency over the longer term.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).